There is a strong current in contemporary culture advocating
‘holistic’ views as some sort of cure-all. Reductionism
implies attention to a lower level while holistic implies
attention to higher level. These are intertwined in any satis-
factory description: and each entails some loss relative to our
cognitive preferences, as well as some gain … there is no
whole system without an interconnection of its parts and
there is no whole system without an environment.
Varela, 1977. On being autonomous: the lessons of natural
history for systems theory. In: George Klir (Ed.), Applied
Systems Research. Plenum Press, New York. pp. 77 – 85